The Architectural League’s annual Emerging Voices program spotlights North American architects, landscape architects, and urban designers who have significant bodies of realized work and the potential to influence their field.

Sara Zewde is the founding principal of Studio Zewde, a landscape architecture, urban design, and public art practice based in New York City. Underlying her multidisciplinary design team’s work is the belief that narratives of people and place can serve as a guide towards shaping landscapes and materials into unique environments that resonate with those they serve. To this end, the firm endeavors to investigate each site’s cultural and ecological context to create meaningful, carefully detailed, enduring places.

Lori A. Brown is an architect, educator, and scholar. She is president of ArchiteXX, which she cofounded in 2012; principal of lab practices, a research and design firm founded in 2005; and a professor at Syracuse University. Her interdisciplinary practice draws on geography, art, law, and women’s and gender studies “to bring the work of architecture more substantially into social, political, and institutional arenas,” with the goal of “transforming spatial structures to promote equity and inclusivity.”